• Rising up stark against the undulating coastline, the church steeple stretched skyward. Old brickwork and black shingles spoke to the age of the Presbyterian church, and it was difficult to ever imagine the town without it, as though it had simply risen from the earth and homes had been built within its sheltering shadow while the wrought iron finial reached for Heaven. It was not, perhaps, the tallest point in the community, but it was the most distinct, and Crede wondered if perhaps the community founders had felt closer to God sitting here beneath the steeple. Perhaps it had been intended as a conduit for the Blessings of the Holy Spirit, or to draw down manna.

    What he did know was that the steeple was an excellent magnet for electricity, and it was impossible to tell where the rebuilding efforts ended and the old church began. The church had hired a pro after the steeple was destroyed in an unusually intense thunder storm last fall. Local rumor said that the insurance company had refused to pay on the policy, citing the incident as an “act of God.” It had been good for a laugh, and today’s Fall Fair was intended to help replenish the church coffers.
    While not a religious man, Crede Connors enjoyed spending an uneventful Monday afternoon wandering aimlessly among table laden with preserves and sweets, gently used clothing and toys, and knit wear and crafts. The salty tang in the fall air, and the brilliant colours of the leaves, made coastal living worth the often inclement and always unpredictable weather. The church had out done itself this year, with tables spilling from the large adjoined hall into the grassy courtyard, and he had passed five different raffles.

    Currently, he stood half watching the groups of children shouting and chasing one another across the lawn and half watching Kira while she sat with, of all things, a psychic. Crede had met Kira four years before at a psychic reading. He had gone out of academic interest, always willing to suspend disbelief in the name of furthering the study of the paranormal. His interest at the time, as a parapsychologist, was the affect receiving a message from an alleged loved one who had passed on had on the crowd. What he had found instead, was Kira.

    There had been nothing stunning about her appearance, about the way her mousy brown hair had been styled and she had looked very plain in her faded denim jacket. He wouldn’t have noticed her at all if she hadn’t stood up in the middle of one poor woman’s reading to accuse the medium of being a fraud. Crede wasn’t sure who had been more mortified, the medium who had been in the midst of telling a weeping woman that her father was happily at peace, or the woman who was then informed that while her father had indeed passed on, he was furious with her for digging up his weed-ridden flower beds and throwing out his recliner. What he was sure of was that he fell madly in love with Kira on the spot.

    Kira, he soon learned, was a very gifted medium who spent her free time traveling around the East Coast to expose what she called frauds. She avoided, as best as she could, passing along messages from the dearly departed but she simply couldn’t stand people who took advantage of other people’s grief. The more he talked to her, the more Crede became convinced that Kira was one of the biggest skeptics he had ever met. And she saw spirits on a regular basis!

    Today Crede was relieved to know that Kira wasn’t on the hunt, and instead had paid the rather strange looking woman $20 for the simple pleasure of having her fortune told. It would give them both something to laugh about later when they settled in for their Monday Night ritual.

    “I see you surrounded by many children,” the woman intoned above the jangling of her bangles. “I see you both surrounded, and there are many, many children.”

    Kira laughed. “And how old are these children?”

    Crede was thinking the same as she: Crede would be starting his first teaching term in the new year at the local university. He had been hired as a member of the psychology department, and was in the process of planning his first parapsychology course. He and Kira affectionately referred to his students-to-be as “the kids” even though they were both aware that there would only be ten years, perhaps less, in the age difference between Crede and his students. He was only twenty-eight.

    As the psychic began to babble again, Crede let his mind wander until Kira wrapped herself around his right arm and kissed him, whispering, “You’d better be planning to propose soon, Cee. She foresees swarms of babies around us.”

    “Oh she does, does she? Are you sure it’s not just lead poisoning from all of that costume jewelry? I’m pretty sure she cleaned one of the tables before we got here.”

    Kira laughed as they started to walk away arm in arm. “Now Crede, you know how important appearance is today’s psychic. If you’re not going to wear a wig that looks like a curly football helmet, then you simply must wear ornamental jewels.” She giggled again and bumped him with her shoulder. “Is there anything else you wanted to check out while we were here?”

    “No,” Crede replied. “I’ve already bought five tickets on a quilt and eaten enough fudge to give a dentist nightmares.”

    Kira frowned. “A quilt? Since when did you care about bedding?”

    “I don’t! But those old ladies were giving me the evil eye, I walked past so many times. I was scared they were going to try and give me religion if I didn’t buy some.” Kira rolled her eyes and reached into the paper bag in Crede’s other hand as they made their way to the car. She pulled out a piece of fudge and popped it into her mouth as they approached the bus stop.

    Two forty minutes and two transfers later the couple were within walking distance of the little bungalow they shared. It was close enough to both the call center where Kira worked and the university that neither had really seen the need for them to own a car, not when the bus stop was so close by. Kira often joked that they were doing their part for the environment, but Crede knew they just couldn’t afford to keep one on the road and pay the rent on the house. It was perfectly placed, and far enough away from the student housing districts that Crede could almost forget that they lived so close to the university.

    Crede unlocked the front door and held it open for Kira, who began to call for Gimpy as she removed her shoes. The black tom came staggering excitedly from the living room, his gate comparable to that of a freshman during pledge week. The cat had some sort of neurological disorder that Kira couldn’t pronounce and Crede could never remember. There was nothing wrong with the cat, except that its back end didn’t function as it should and so the cat appeared to be permanently hammered. Kira had felt so sorry for it as a kitten at the SPCA that nothing else would do: it had to come home with her.

    Never mind that she had been there with a friend who was supposed to be adopting a kitten, or that she and Crede lived in a small apartment which explicitly stated “No Pets” in the lease contract. Gimpy was smuggled home in her jacket, and bags of kitty litter had become permanent fixtures in Crede’s grad office. He had smuggled that home in small amounts, tied up in plastic shopping bags that got throw into the bottom of his back pack. Once the kitten became established, they naturally had to move to a location that would allow pets. That location had been here.

    Kira scooped the cat up into her arms, cradling it like a baby as it began to purr loudly. Crede hung up his jacket and closed the door behind him before tossing his keys into the bowl on the hall table. He followed as Kira padded into the living room in her socks and threw herself onto the old, over stuffed couch.

    “What do you want for supper tonight, babe?” he asked her, reaching for the cordless phone. “The usual, or are you in the mood for Chinese again?”

    “Nah, the usual’s good. It wouldn’t be Monday if we didn’t get pizza from Polis.”

    Crede chuckled and called to order their extra large with the works. It was a part of their Monday night, and he often wondered what he had done with his Monday’s before Kira had moved in. He couldn’t remember, but he knew that now they meant an evening curled up on the couch together eating greasy pizza and watching a group of university would-be paranormal investigators made a mockery of what Crede hoped desperately to do one day.

    He was sure they didn’t do it on purpose, and suspected that the show’s producers had more to do with the presence of the showy Goth who was the team’s Occult “expert” and minister-in-training demeanor of their lead investigator. He wasn’t even sure why they watched except that it was so over done, and so poorly over done, that it was hilarious. Satan and his minions had evidently taken a liking to rural trailer courts, and this week they were investigating a UFO ranch. If anything, it allowed Crede the belief that there was some legitimacy to his work if people were willing to believe this.

    Kira simply felt that someone needed to watch it. It was terrible television, but someone had gone to the trouble of producing and filming it.

    This week, the ritual felt different. Perhaps it was the bags in the hall, waiting for the next morning. Crede glanced over at them as he sat down, putting his arm around Kira and waiting for her to snuggle in close. She did, and followed his gaze.

    “Excited about your first real investigation?”

    Crede smiled. Since completing his degree, Crede had suffered from an intense dislike of libraries. He felt as though he had spent six or seven years living in one as he researched paper after paper, combing his way through books and articles on theory and laboratory experiments, criticism on methods all in the hope that one day he’d be able to do field research of his own. It had been frustrating, and unrewarding in many ways. No matter how carefully constructed, it was impossible for a paragraph, sentence or book to describe the paranormal adequately, to convey the experience of it. He wanted to feel the hair raise on his arms as he stepped across the cold spot, not read about it in a stuffy academic journal.

    His first chance had come much sooner than expected, and his department head has asked him two months ago if he would be interested in participating in a local investigation. Doctor Langdon Kirk was looking for a member of the local faculty to assist him, and Crede had jumped at the chance. His primary job was to do research on the location, but he would also be on hand for the full investigation.

    Doctor Kurt was a hero of sorts to Crede. The man had possibly done more research in the field than any other parapsychologist or paranormal investigator in the last thirty years. He seemed, some how or another, to have his name attached to all of the major research sites in the United States and Europe. If this investigation was successful, it could be the beginning of Crede’s career as a field researcher rather than as a stuffy academic searching in vague library corners for articles and books to critique.

    “I guess I’m a bit,” he conceded. “Doctor Kurt is kind of a big deal, after all.”

    “Mmm,” Kira agreed. “The Elvis of the spook world.”

    Crede rolled his eyes and wondered again how someone so gifted could be so sarcastic about the possibility of spirit activity. However irreverent she was, however, Crede knew that Kira was possibly the only woman who would understand his passion and support him so completely. His family and friends from his undergrad were all still of the opinion that he was either crazy or wasting an otherwise brilliant mind on a fruitless pursuit, but Kira knew there was more to it. She didn’t quite understand why it was so important to him, but she knew it made him happy and for that Crede was willing to tolerate her references to spooks, stiffs, and ghosties. He’d probably do the same if he encountered them as often as she did.

    Apparently, being dead did nothing for improving the intelligence of the average ghost.

    Once the pizza arrived, it was only a matter of time before Crede fell into a comfortable silence and Kira vented her indignation at the television. This week’s episode saw the intrepid group of ametures investigating a case of demonic possession involving a young artist in her twenties. Even in the low quality pictures being presented to the television audience, Crede could tell it was staged. The “burned” letters looked more like the handy work of a thumb tack, and while it was true the victim could certainly not have carved the words into her body in those locations, an accomplice certainly could. Only three season in, the show was rapidly going down hill as it catered to the naïve, the gullible and the uneducated and attacked their fears. Crede took the time to think, mentally running through the information he had been able to gather on the site for tomorrow.

    He was uncertain, really, whether MacIntyre’s Textiles had been built here because of the town or if the town had grown up around it. It had begun as a cotton mill and was established before the town was much more than a smudge on the map. It had prospered with the local port to assist in the shipping of raw cotton to the gin and of finished fabric to an assortment of markets. James MacIntyre, the founder, had seemed to have a streak of financial genius as he expanded his markets and found small ways to create big improvements in the facility. Born in Scotland, he had also been something of a miser, spending frugally and putting the rest to work making more money. He had turned an unpromising track of land into a booming business that had changed hands multiple times since his death in 1789. Officially, it had been ruled an accidental fall which ad broken his neck but rumor still persisted that it had been a suicide, that he had jumped from the second story landing.

    Whatever had happened, it hadn’t deterred buyers. The gin had continued to prosper and was now a modern textile mill owned by a local businessman named Anton Manning. It was under Anton’s ownership that the incidents had occurred, or at least become prominent. It had started with the miscarriages. An unusually high number of the women working in the factory reported miscarriages while working there. One woman was in the process of suing Manning on the grounds that his facility had been the cause of her problems; during the six years she had worked in the factory she had been unable to successfully carry a pregnancy to term. Within a year of being placed on stress leave, she had given birth to a healthy baby girl and her doctors had been unable to determine a cause as to why the healthy woman had suffered such difficulties in the past.

    Then there were the children. Factory employees generally avoided any situation that would bring their children into the factory or on to the property for any length of time. It was a local superstition that the site was haunted, a belief that had originated from the number of children employed by MacIntyre and who had died in those early days after inhaling air born fibers. Manning, however, was determined to have his business appear family friendly and had encouraged the local elementary school to bring a group of students through on a fieldtrip. The school had gladly done so, bringing a group of forty eight and nine year olds to spend a morning of discovery in the factory. Of that group of forty, twenty seven became very ill within days of having visited the factory. Five were hospitalized with dangerously high fevers.

    Crede remembered his days in public school and could recall the way colds and the flu seemed to spread like an epidemic among the students, but this was different. Only the students who had been on the field trip had become ill. Manning had been mortified and immediately closed the factory and called in government agencies to check the water, air quality, and soil for a cause of the illness. Had he failed to do so, it would have ruined his business. After many months of very expensive testing, there had been nothing found. No lead in the water, no mold or esbestos, no toxins. There was absolutely no environmental factor that would be found, and nothing on the site and nothing found in the systems of the sick children. Fortunately none had died, although it had been a frightening two weeks for the community.

    Anton Manning was now a man at the end of his rope and as more and more causes were excluded, his staff came forward with more and more outlandish stories of apparitions and voices they had encountered within the factory. Stories of hearing children, or of tools being moved, in some cases from locked tool boxes or lockers. Manning had dismissed it, but as his employees became more and more insistent, more and more fearful, he had given in and called Doctor Kurt to ask for his expert opinion.

    A particularly violent outburst from Kira jarred Crede from his thoughts. She had jerked forward to the edge of the couch out of his arms, swearing violently at the television.

    “Bullshit!” she yelled. “Bull-s**t! I declare shenanigans, there’s no way – no way – they were able to do that!”

    “Do what?” Crede asked, chagrined to have to admit that he hadn’t been paying attention, but know it was better than being left in the dark. “What did they do?”

    “They exorcised her! With a priest, on national television! There’s no way, it was a fake exorcism. There’s no way the church would allow that kind of publicity, especially on an exorcism. They keep that kind of thing behind locked doors and have ever since it became a popular theme for bad horror movies. They wouldn’t have even had time to get it sanctioned.”

    “What do you mean? All they have to do is find a priest willing to perform it, don’t they?”

    Kira’s look was one of shocked disgust, telling Crede he should know better and that he had asked the worst possible question at that moment. Her tone, however, was one of endless patience as she calmly explained.

    “Exorcism’s a big deal, Crede. Especially for the Catholics. They changed the rules for it about nine years ago, but some things do not change. Firstly, the priest has to obtain permission from the local bishop before he can do anything but suggest that an exorcism may be needed. Then the victim needs to undergo a rigorous medical testing to rule out any chance of physical or mental illness that could be causing the symptoms. Nine point nine times out of ten, one of those is to blame and there’s no exorcism. These guys just pulled one off in two, three days tops without the full investigation.

    “Then, after the medical causes are ruled out, there still has to be proof of a demonic possession and words randomly appearing on the body isn’t proof of that. The victim needs to be speaking in tongues, not just uttering a couple of key phrases in German or some foreign language. It has to be consistent, frequent, and they can have no knowledge of the language. Then they have to know things, hidden things, that they would have no way of knowing. And then there’s always your displays of supernatural abilities and strength. This girl had none of that. There were no grounds for an exorcism, and the whole thing has been staged! Any idiot who took a minute to actually look at it would know that!”

    Crede reached out to gently rub Kira’s back. She was furious, and there was nothing he could say or do to calm her but let her vent her spleen. He couldn’t blame her. Kira viewed this kind of performance as exploitation, attacking people’s fears of the unknown and twisting them into a kind of cheap showmanship. It made a mockery of the fear, of legitimate cases of possession, and of the religious beliefs behind it all. Neither Crede nor Kira were particularly religious, but it was still sickening to see it abused and cheapened like this, on cable television, for ratings. Kira spent every moment of her free time fighting to expose frauds just like this because she believed it protected the vulnerable.

    She shook her head and cuddled up against Crede again with a frustrated sigh. “Promise me you’re never going to do something like this with your research. Show some decency in your work.”

    Crede chuckled. “Don’t worry Kira, I’m an academic. They beat any sense of showmanship in grad school. I’m a stuffy academic now.”

    “I don’t know if that’s much better, Cee. But time will tell, I suppose. Just show them some respect when you’re working. They aren’t toys, and spirits can get really miffed when we step out of line.”

    They didn’t bother to watch the second episode, nor did they discuss it. They simply turned off the television and quietly got ready for bed. Kira was troubled, and Crede hated to leave her like that. He knew she’d be riled up for the next few days, that she’d eventually settle again, he just wished he could do something for her. He felt like a heel for leaving her like this, for being excited about leaving early the next morning.

    It seemed to be bothering Kira more now as they pulled back the covers and crawled into bed. She was unusually quiet, but so was he. It just seemed that if they avoided it, it wasn’t real. He wasn’t even sure why it bothered him so much. It was going to be a few days, a couple of weeks at most, that he would be away and staying at the site. He wasn’t even leaving town!

    “It won’t be long,” he murmured softly to Kira s he drifted to sleep. “And I can still come by and see you when I can get some time away from collecting materials. We won’t be at it all hours of the day and night.”

    “I know,” Kira said quietly. “Something just doesn’t feel right, Crede, and I’m worried. Maybe it was TV and that psychic today, but I’m worried about this. Promise me you’ll be careful, okay?”

    “Promise,” Crede replied. “I have to come back in one piece, remember? So we can start having those many, many children.”